Erik H. Erikson quotes

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The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, sh...ameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age,... with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense... of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness, his defeats will substantiate it. The questions as to who is bigger and who can do or not do this or that, and to whom--these questions fill the adult's inner life far beyond the necessities and the desirabilities which he understands and for which he plans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated ans...wers. But Freud, in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said: "Lieben und arbeiten" (to love and to work). It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it gets deeper as you think about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is not easy to construct by mere scientific synthesis a foolproof system which will lead our children in a desired direction an...d avoid an undesirable one. Obviously, good can come only from a continuing interplay between that which we, as students, are gradually learning and that which we believe in, as people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The infant's first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, beca...use she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Children must eventually train their own children, and any impoverishment of their impulse life, for the sake of avoiding friction..., must be considered a possible liability affecting more than one lifetimeLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We must learn to differentiate between fears and anxieties. Fears are states of apprehension which focus on isolated and recogniza...ble dangers so that they may be judiciously appraised and realistically countered. Anxieties are diffuse states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery. These two forms of apprehension obviously often occur together, and we can insist on a strict separation only for the sake of the present argument. If, in an economic depression, a man is afraid that he may lose his money, his fear may be justified. But if the idea of having to live on an income only ten times, instead of twenty-five times as large as that of his average fellow-citizen causes him to lose his nerve and to commit suicide, then we must consult our clinical formulas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child's play... is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able to represent to the child... a deep, an almost somatic conviction that there is a meaning to what they are doing. Ultimately, children become neurotic not from frustrations, but from the lack or loss of societal meaning in these frustrations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »